Evidence-based analysis on European strategic autonomy. Filter by sector or search the archive.
The EU Recovery and Resilience Facility was launched to support post-Covid recovery while accelerating structural transformation through investment and reform. This column provides a preliminary descriptive assessment of the macroeconomic impact of the facility in Italy, Greece, and Spain, three countries with large allocations. Using simple counterfactual comparisons, it presents evidence consistent with a positive…
With American competitiveness declining, the EU has a chance to offer tech start-ups something better. To create this new generation of EU Incs, the bloc will first need to better align its regulation and resources
When Russian forces seized Crimea in early 2014, many in Europe treated it as a contained, regional crisis — a violation of international law, certainly, but one confined to Ukraine’s borders. More than a decade later, that containment never held. What began with unmarked soldiers on a peninsula has grown into a sustained, continent-wide campaign […]
Few accusations in British politics generate as much heat, and as little settled agreement, as the suggestion that Nigel Farage has served, wittingly or not, as an instrument of Russian interests. It’s an allegation Farage has repeatedly and firmly denied, and one that has never been established as fact by any court, official inquiry, or […]
Every wave of large-scale migration into Europe over the past decade has produced the same split-screen: images of families fleeing war or starvation arriving with nothing, alongside the rapid rise of political movements built substantially around opposing their arrival. Both halves of that image are real. The humanitarian case for taking in people fleeing Syria’s […]
Every essay in this series has described a different front in the same broader project — energy, minerals, industry, chips, AI, telecommunications, finance, health, food, education, labor, infrastructure, space, cyber defense, and trade. Each one, examined on its own, has a plausible path forward. But there is a reason so many of these efforts — […]
This final essay is really the connecting thread running through every one before it. Energy diversification, mineral partnerships in Africa and South America, chip fab locations, food import sources — all of them are, at their core, expressions of a single underlying strategic instinct: don’t let any single country hold enough leverage over Europe to […]
Every other goal in this series depends on infrastructure that can, in principle, be attacked without a single soldier crossing a border. Power grids, hospitals, financial systems, and telecommunications networks have all been targeted by state-linked cyberattacks in recent years, and Europe has experienced this directly — Ukraine’s power grid was hit by Russian-linked attacks […]
Space has quietly become as critical to daily life as electricity or telecommunications — satellite navigation guides everything from farm equipment to financial transaction timestamps, satellite imagery informs military planning and climate monitoring alike, and launch capability determines who gets to put any of it into orbit in the first place. Europe built real strength […]
Every strategy described so far in this series — energy, industry, chips, AI, finance, talent — assumes something that doesn’t yet fully exist: a Europe that functions as one connected market rather than 27 separate national ones stitched together by treaties. Goods, power, data, and people still move across European borders less freely than the […]